Startup Wolfpack uses ParkMyCloud to Save 65% on AWS; Reduce Burn

Startup Wolfpack uses ParkMyCloud to Save 65% on AWS; Reduce Burn

The Challenge

Jonathan Chashper is no novice when it comes to product startups: since founding his product acceleration company, ProductSavvy, in 2006, he has helped a wide range of fast growth companies accelerate and strengthen their product capabilities, and build and launch new market offerings.

This time, though, Jonathan had an idea for a product of his own.

“I came up with the idea while riding with a group of my buddies.”, says Jonathan Chashper, CEO and Founder of Product Savvy, “We (myself and another rider) actually got disconnected from the main group minutes into the ride and found ourselves spending the next 30min trying to figure out how to find the main group and re-join the ride. Needless to say, not the most pleasant experience. When I got home, I figured there has to be a better way to ride.”

That’s when Wolfpack was born: an app for motorcycle riders to plan group rides, invite a pack, navigate together, and communicate.

As the idea started to take form, the team chose Scrum as their methodology to bring the product to market as fast as possible. They just needed to ensure they could optimize their resources and keep burn in check.

The Solution

The Wolfpack team took advantage of a variety of resources Amazon Web Services (AWS) has to offer – from On Demand instances to RDS to Auto Scaling groups and more. Continuous integration, fast development cycles and smart use of AWS resources allowed WolfPack to be developed (full stack including Server Side, iOS, Android and Web) within 14 weeks. AWS was a critical ingredient in the fast development cycle and keeping dev costs down.

“What Amazon is doing is unbelievable,” Jonathan said. “Things that used to take months or years to accomplish, you can now accomplish in days and weeks by clicking a couple of buttons and writing a little bit of code.”

In addition to the efficiencies that AWS provides, Jonathan also had his developers operate on a continuous delivery process, and ensured that cost optimization was a priority. To that end, the team implemented ParkMyCloud.All non-production instances were put on a schedule to run only when needed, which for Wolfpack is 12 hours a day, 5 days a week – only 60 of the 168 hours of the week.

The Result

By using ParkMyCloud to schedule off times for their non-production instances, Wolfpack is getting 65% savings.

“Even for very small company like us – we have 7-10 servers – we’re still managing to save money with ParkMyCloud. That’s pretty awesome,” Jonathan said. “Essentially you get free money for spending maybe 15 minutes to implement ParkMyCloud, and no up-front costs. There is literally no reason not to use ParkMyCloud.”

About Wolfpack

Wolfpack reinvents the group riding experience. Plan group rides, invite your pack, navigate together, and communicate, all from your Android or iOS device. For more information, visit www.wolfpack.run or read their release announcement.